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Late Adopters Prefer the Tried and True
Posted by
Zonk
on Thu Mar 13, 2008 08:38 AM
from the little-flexibility-never-hurt-too dept.
from the little-flexibility-never-hurt-too dept.
smooth wombat writes "There is a fairly significant portion of the population which does not go out and grab the newest OS, gadget, web browser or any other technology related product. Why? It's not because they're luddites but rather, they are comfortable with what they know. Take the case of John Uribe, a 56-year old real estate agent who still uses AOL dial-up and only recently switched to Firefox after being prodded for weeks by an AOL message telling him that on March 1st, AOL would no longer support Netscape. Why did it take him so long to stop using Netscape and make the switch? From the article: 'It worked for me, so I stuck with it. Until there is really some reason to totally abandon it, I won't.'"
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Thanks, Captain Obvious. (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Thanks, Captain Obvious. (Score:5, Insightful)
Some tech is just too damned expensive new. I'd like an iPhone but they're just too damned pricey. Some tech comes from companies I'd rather spit dead rats than buy from - Sony and ATT come to mind.
Some tech is obviously not ready for use yet - any Mixrosoft x.0 release, for instance. I'll bet there aren't many early Windows adopters here, because everyone knows you don't buy a new Windows until at LEAST the SP1 service pack comes out fixing its most glaring errors.
Finally, there's a reason they call it "bleeding edge technology".
-mcgrew
PS Now get off my lawn you damned kids and no, you can't have your burlout back.
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Re:Thanks, Captain Obvious. (Score:5, Insightful)
I mean, what kind of car do you have where you need "$100,000" worth of equipment to work on it? About the most advanced thing you might need for certain problems is the little diagnostic reader, and you can still spend more on a nice floor jack. A socket set and some basic tools get you most of the way there. Read the back part of Popular Mechanics sometime - most common repairs are still basically the same. And cars on balance are much more reliable and free of maintenance. I've had some of the most unreliable cars on the market (thank you, GM), and they were STILL more reliable than what my parents had growing up.
To use your example of refrigerators from the 1920s (!!!), yeah, maybe they would last 40 years. Too bad it would cost roughly the equivalent of $5000 in 2007 dollars. At that price, you could buy a lifetime of so-called crappy modern refrigerators - and each one would pay for itself in the efficiency improvement over the previous one. I don't even want to know how much it would cost to run a refrigerator from the 20s... you really should take into account total cost of ownership.
I don't know where you get your shoes, either, but I've never had a pair with round vinyl laces. This actually has me curious. In any event, you can buy replacement laces for about a buck. Nice, flat, cotton laces. I also won't get into your (hopefully unintentionally) racist comments about Chinese t-shirts. Who still says "Chinamen"??? But if you really likes American-made t-shirts, can't you just buy American Apparel stuff? It's not exactly expensive - and you express a willingness to pay $50 for a well-made t-shirt... you're in luck, a 3-pack is like $40.
Two-handled shower faucets? Go to Home Depot? You can buy one-handled, two-handled, just about anything you can imagine... even temperature controlled. I happen to prefer the hotel-style single valve design... turn it one way for more heat, the other way for more cold.
Old-fashioned furnaces? You like them because they work when the electricity goes out. So do kerosene heaters. With the hundreds you save each month in heating bills, go out and get yourself a kerosene heater.
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Re:Thanks, Captain Obvious. (Score:4, Insightful)
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Enterprises & Browser Stats (Score:5, Informative)
Which leads me to a motive I did not find in the article, the motive of the company I work for that employs several hundred thousand employees. There is no push to go to Vista or IE7 so they don't do it. They're late adopters in almost the same sense as no one's asking for it, Microsoft has not yet found a way to force the enterprise community into this pigeonhole and so none of them will do it. On an enterprise level, there's no such thing as 'early adopter' as companies are too busy taking financial and strategic risks to welcome technological risks or 1/10 of their employees failing to have a computer for a couple days.
The same John Uribe? (Score:5, Funny)
So much for sticking with it, eh?
Re:The same John Uribe? (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:The same John Uribe? (Score:5, Insightful)
If John Uribe is a fisherman I'm sure he has all the latest and greatest fishing gear because it's something he places a high value on, if he checks his AOL email once a week to see if he got a message from his grand kids then Netscape is probably all he really needs. Switching to a new bowser wont add any benefit to his internet tasks, but it will involve him spending time to research which browser to use, figuring out how to install it and set it up, and learning a new interface. Where's the benefit in that?
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Re:The same John Uribe? (Score:5, Insightful)
Thanks. I don't visit your sites anymore because I see no reason to turn NoScript off on my modern browser.
Have a nice day.
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Re:The same John Uribe? (Score:5, Insightful)
I think you missed the point entirely. Until it NO LONGER WORKS, he has not motivation to go try a newer one. If he logged onto the net one day and it said "Netscape no longer works with the Internet. It done gone and broke.", then he can still use that browser and it works for him.
Yes, the people are often older, but a lot of people work like that.
Heck my grandfather only passed in 2004 (not too far back - my grandmother passed 2 years afterwards) and up until that point he and my grandmother DID grow (or raised in the case of livestock) almost all of their own food, still watched a black and white television set, drove an old 1983 Ford, and did most of their cooking (and home heating) on a wood-burning stove. They canned their own vegetables in mason jars for the winter; they used to have a whole shed full of canned/jarred food. My granddad would hunt game or slaughter his pigs or chickens for meat. I think it was into the 1970's before they even got indoor plumbing.
Were there better ways to do things? Yep. But their way undeniably worked for them. They both lived into their mid-80's, were never hungry, and didn't live in debt. For some people that's perfectly fine and they don't need to go searching for something "better".
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Re:The same John Uribe? (Score:5, Insightful)
I have an iPhone, I'm running an Alienware laptop that is less than a year old. It started with XP Pro, which I was happy with, but then my son's Alienware laptop came with Vista, so I changed to Vista to be better able to support his system. I don't generally go for the newest things, not because they are new, but because I want a reasonable price on things I buy -- and the newest generally comes with a premium price, and because I want to understand why it's worth it to me to upgrade.
On the other hand, I'm running a linux server that's around seven or eight years old. Why? _Because_it_works_. It does exactly what it needs to do, is absolutely rock solid in stability, and I see no reason so go through the process of upgrading it. Oh, I'm beginning to think it might be nice to move to a different set of hardware -- the cpu fan went out a couple of years ago, so I've got an eight inch fan blowing in the case to keep the thing cool -- it's got less than 8 gb of space total, on three or four disks, and the things it does -- MySQL and web serving wouldn't be too hard to move to a new machine -- but it just works, so I rarely worry about it.
I'm not scared of change, but change for change's sake is silly.
Sean.
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Difference in attitudes (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Difference in attitudes (Score:5, Insightful)
The basis of the story is that we are being sold a lot of hype. Any particular age group or group of people is only being used to say that it's not just one person, or one town. It's happening all over the place. Technology is not a one-size-fits-all proposition.
Eventually the MS vs. GNU/Linux vs. Mac story will sort itself out, and fanbois will stop telling the other side's fanbois that they are wrong. What works for some doesn't work for all. That would be why there are so many types of personal vehicles on the road, to bring the car analogy into it.
This idea will be news until tech manufacturers get it. some day you'll walk into a technology store and the phones will be separated into groups where one is the simple function group, next is a nice mix, and then some high end stuff... each with ranges of pricing. Sure, they kind of do that now but you need assistance to figure out what is easy to operate, or what has features in the plan that you don't want. Eventually tech sales will be comoditized. Today we are still treated as though we are buying a custom made suit, or a piece of art.
Vendor lock-in is to blame. There really is no lock-in deal with low end, low functionality equipment, so they always try to sell you the latest, greatest, steaming pile of tech. Cash is supposed to be king, but no one really cares unless they can get you locked in to a 3 year contract and $15/month insurance. It's all about money still as they really don't care what you want to buy so long as you buy something with a three year contract and insurance premiums.
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Re:Difference in attitudes (Score:4, Insightful)
Saying that because something is so old it is broken doesn't make any sense. If you use a 10 year old browser and dialup just to check the weather, as long as it can still check the weather, it isn't broken.
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Burned (Score:4, Insightful)
Why fix it... (Score:5, Interesting)
All this doesn't mean I don't like new technology. However, all the years of work in IT and high-tech startups have taught me that the best innovation one can achieve is a more simplified interface. Technology with more features and thus more complex interface is thus not truly innovative in my book.
Guns and other stuff, too (Score:5, Insightful)
The best example I can think of? The Colt model of 1911 is still considered by lots of people to be the finest fighting sidearm ever. It certainly was in its day. That day lasted until the mid-1980s when the Glock came along. It's taken 20 years, but if you attend a *serious* personal defense class (not one of those "get your carry license in a day" things) where the students select and bring their own sidearm, you'll generally find something close to an even split between 1911s and Glocks. It's taken more than 20 years for a superior design to achieve acceptance by the cognescenti.
Old and obsolete often means tried and true. When I'm betting my life, I like the idea of tried and true. That attitude is often displayed by thoughtful folks in all areas of their life; we like what works and will change only when something demonstrably better is available and the inconvenience of using the old tech becomes sufficiently painful.
In other news, I'm considering switching to a digital camera any day now.
Total Late Adopter here (Score:4, Insightful)
My laptop, with a 133Mhz Pentium, 48MB RAM, and an 800 x 600 screen, was bought used 10 years ago from a friend who was in grad school (and thus on a tight budget herself). I've been using it quite a bit recently, to learn Lisp programming on (X + IceWM + Emacs).
The internet connection is 100MBps optical fiber, but I just plug my PC in directly for PPPoE -- no wireless router or anything like that.
Got an iPod last year - a 512MB Shuffle which was a hand-me-down from my girlfriend. Until then, my portable music player was a Sony MiniDisc-Walkman, which I still use for live recordings.
My cell phone is seven years old, and it cost nothing when I got it.
Stereo is a 15-year-old Nakamichi receiver, still in good condition -- better than the flaky Sony DVD player I bought four years ago.
OK, maybe I'm just a cheapskate. But really, I can't think of anything that I'd really want to go out and buy - that sort of thing happens only about once a year. (And I could well afford any such thing if I wanted it.) Basically, everything still works, and until it stops working, I feel it's a waste to replace it.
Re:Set in their ways (Score:5, Insightful)
What was that? You just use your house to live in and it works just fine? Oh...
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Re:Set in their ways (Score:4, Interesting)
Except that I don't have hundreds of thousands of dollars.
Oh, and its nothing like a new browser, which is free and should take minimal time to "learn." If I could rebuild my house with all that stuff for such a minimal cost, I certainly would.
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Re:Set in their ways (Score:4, Interesting)
First off, I was talking about a web browser, not office software. Second, your point is obsurd; 100% of the hours available to you you're not going to make billable. You're likely going to take 1/3 of those for sleeping, and probably another 1/3 live your life, and that's assuming you work every Saturday and Sunday. So those hours you wouldn't normally bill anyway are not part of your opportunity cost. Also, since you probably use those programs on the job, you'll likely be paying yourself to learn something new. Finally, I would think that no matter what field you are in, if you stop learning, you're going to become obsolete. So you'll need to take some time, whether billable or not, to learn.
Besides, not all construction is replacement. If you add a deck or a sunroom, or remodel the basement, you're looking at new things. Of course, like all analogies - mine is nowhere near 1:1. The point is that new things take time and effort (and often money), and we all can't be abreast of the latest (or even recent) developments in all fields. There aren't enough hours in the day. To think everyone will find interest in _your_ field or hobby is a bit vain.
I realize not all construction is replacement; if its new, there's less cost than replacing something existing. But we're not talking about construction, we're talking about people using older browsers. The cost there is minimal, since even modern browsers have Back, Forward, Stop and Refersh, and some way to track favorite sites. Not exactly a huge learning curve, and you can decide to look at the new features at any time.
I never said people can or should keep up with the latest everything, but they should be on the look out for something new and at least look into it a little. As in construction, sometime cost up front saves you more down the line. Like when the cost of maintaining my old car outweighed the cost of just getting a new one.
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Re:Set in their ways (Score:4, Insightful)
How does one learn the "tricks of the trade" without asking? I can read a million books on sill repair, but I can get a lot more information from the friends I have, and people I work with who have gone through this in the past... to realize that yeah, using the lollie columns in my basement may jack the house up and I only really need to move it up 3/8ths of an inch and repair the rotted section... but still, talking to someone who's -done- it is worth a lot, too.
I think that "thought process" or attitude is where the same technology questions come from.
Just my two cents.
(Oh and do you know how I can stop the sill rot without having to replace it? The house is 130+ years old, etc...)
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Re:Set in their ways (Score:5, Insightful)
I needed a new roof, so I hired a roofer. We'll call him "roof support." If he would have told me to learn more about roofing and that my questions were stupid, I would have fired him.
Next, I needed my AC serviced, we'll call him "HVAC Support." If he would have told me that my questions on general maintenance were stupdid, or he would have said "RTFM" I would have fired him.
I pay people for support for jobs that I can't or don't want to do myself, if they suggest that I learn more about their jobs to make their lives easier, I fire them and get someone that meets my needs.
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Re:Set in their ways (Score:5, Insightful)
Yes, there are many, many stubborn people out there. Like the ones who still drive ten year old cars rather than the newest, shinier ones with all the bells and whistles they will never use like GPS, an iPod plug, tv screens and so on. Or maybe the ones who still use a vcr to record their tv shows because they don't have to leave it on whatever channel they want to record without having to pay extra for a service to pull down their shows.
These are horrible people who are devastating the American economy because they refuse to go along with the marketing mindset that if it's new, it must be better, and so you must go and spend, spend, spend.
The older generations, 40+ have no concept of technology and most of them don't want to.
Hey dipwad, I just turned 41 and I can tell you, I have more of a grasp of technology than the vast majority of 20 somethings wandering around my building acting as consultants for an ERP project. The fact that I choose not to have a cell phone, iPod, Blackberry and other electronic gizmos does not mean I have no concept of technology. It means I don't care about that stuff. Having any of those items will not enrich my life in any way, except maybe the iPod.
For the record, while there are people older than I who do not care about computers, I can tell you I have encountered quite a few, including my mother, who want to learn. In fact, the reason my mother uses a computer, other than keeping in touch with people, is, in her words, to keep her skills sharp. She retired ten years ago and still wants to learn. How about that?
If it requires any sort of effort to learn, people try to pretend its not there and stick with what they have until it is no longer a viable option.
You mean like driving a manual transmission, right? Because it's so difficult to learn how to push in a pedal and move a lever.
This saddens me greatly.
What saddens me is people like you on their high horse who think that everyone must always be on the cutting edge. That the latest and greatest is the only way to go. If you don't own what the marketing droids tell you to own, you're not worth the time or effort.
I work with people like you and let me tell, in the time it takes them to find the piece of information they want, or perform whatever task they want to accomplish, I generally have time to go get a drink or take a shit before they're finished, it takes them that long. These are generally the same people who constantly complain they have no time for a life, relationship or anything else because their Blackberry is constantly buzzing or they have to answer an IM.
If that's the kind of life you want to lead, be my guest. Most people don't give a shit about gadgets and do-dads but instead, want something to work well and last a long time.
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Re:Typical for Real Estate (Score:4, Insightful)
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